Heather Cox Richardson

Heather Cox Richardson

Heather Cox Richardson is an American historian and Professor of History at Boston College. Richardson has authored six books. Her sixth, titled How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America, was published in March 2020 by Oxford University Press.

About Heather Cox Richardson in brief

Summary Heather Cox RichardsonHeather Cox Richardson is an American historian and Professor of History at Boston College. Richardson has authored six books. Her sixth, titled How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America, was published in March 2020 by Oxford University Press. She is also a founder and editor at werehistory. org, which presents professional history to a public audience through short articles. Between 2017 and 2018, she co-hosted the NPR podcast Freak Out and Carry On. She received both her B. A. and Ph. D. from Harvard University, where she studied under David Herbert Donald and William Gienapp. Richardson’s first book, The Greatest Nation of the Earth, stemmed from her dissertation at Harvard University.

Richardson extended her study of Republican policy into the postwar period with The Death of Reconstruction. She presented Reconstruction as a national event that impacted all Americans, not just those in the South. She incorporated the West into the discussion of Reconstruction as no predecessor had. She extended the Republican Party into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with To Make Men Free: A History of Republican Party in the 1850s and 20th century. She studied the entire presidency of George W. Bush from its inception through the presidency of Barack Obama. She argues that Republicans began to emulate what they originally opposed: powerful bankers and industrialists sacrificing the well-being of ordinary Americans.